I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.
For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.
I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.
My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
- Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
- The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
- Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
- Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
- You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
- A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
- My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
- Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
- Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
- NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
- The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
- Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
- An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.